Sealbound - Jam Edition

Hi, welcome to my Jam submission for the Gamedev.tv Game Jam 2025.

In Sealbound - Jam Edition you, as the character wake up inside an unfamiliar ruin. Without recollection of who or where you are, you must explore to unlock the secrets of the ruins, and defeat the powerful foes that dwell there. In front of you is an altar, with tiny domes; These domes contain small worlds, with ruins of similar design to the ones around you. Leading up to the altar of domes is a tiny bridge, connected to a standing platform which allows you to shrink down to the size of the domes to enter the worlds within, and explore them for power, exploration and keys to further your exploration.

Behind the altar of domes is a strange pedestal, what secrets lurk in this ruins, and what does this pedestal have to do with it all?

Controls:

WASD - Move

Left Mouse - Attack

E - Interact

Gameplay: 

In the hub area, stand on the platform at the bottom of the tiny bridge in order to shrink down in size, allowing you to walk up to the domes on the round altar. From there you can enter the white dome in front of you to explore the main dungeon, in here are enemies, rewards and key items to discover before heading back to the hub to work out what to do with the key items.

Your goal is to defeat the boss fight and defeat whatever forces await you. To do this, it's advised to collect power ups from the main dungeon, improve your damage and health, and use these boosts to have a fair fight against tougher opponents.

Tips:

• As long as you don't refresh the page/app, you can continue getting stronger by repeating the dungeon. Chests have guaranteed drops for upgrades, and enemies have a chance to drop the same types of upgrades. Repeat the dungeon as many times as you need to get strong enough to handle the boss (Dying doesn't reset stats)
• You are faster than your foes, allowing you to pick your engagements should your health for a run become low.
• The enemies aren't too smart, being left idle for so long, their senses betray them, allowing you to lose their aggro by distance or hiding behind their sight.

 Dev Notes & Technical Talk:

This development journey was rougher than normal, the timing lined up at the end of a big submission for my university work, which affected me throughout the jam recovering. Spending much less time than usual a lot of intended mechanics and gameplay content was scrapped. To this end the game feels very unfinished, lacking some art assets and any form of Post Processing. 

Key missing mechanics include:

• Procedural Levels
• Borderlands inspired loot system
• Block/Dodge/Heavy Attack, to improve the combat system
• Music and Sounds
• Reactive Enemies
• Fully interactive boss fight

This title is very much still in a Prototype/MVP stage, and a viable contender for an "Improvement Jam" in future.

Mechanically the strongest area of this project was the new approach to my Finite State Machine (FSM) system for Enemy AI. Instead of reusing my old reliable FSM, for this Jam I made a new one from scratch, the key difference between the implementation is the switch in how state creation and transition is handled. My old FSM creates a new state every time a transition is performed, which is better for initial load times, is less performant if many objects are attempting to change states frequently. The new FSM however created one state for each of the available states on the load of the scene, stores the available states within a Dictionary and is used to define the paths in the FSM controller to be used across all states. This implementation is much more performant during gameplay as all creation of states is handled upon entering the scene, and produces no garbage to be cleaned up during runtime, allowing an entire enemy to only need to be created and deleted once per agent, the downside to this system is the potential increased load time per scene, as all of this data is created as soon as the level is loaded. (If you read all this, you're awesome, this was just a discussion on the most interesting part of development)

Overall with this Jam, I'm happy to have released a functional game, despite the added difficulties this year, and can't wait for the next annual jam to try something new and push my limits further.

Thank you for taking the time to play my game, and read through this overly large block of text! Any feedback including any discovered bugs are much appreciated, and I look forward to seeing what other community members have achieved with this 10 day event!

(Note: Downloadable Build is currently broken, will be fixed at soonest possible time)